Isolden (my 1st world map)

[Neyjour]

I still have a lot to do on the land/terrain, but I wanted to start figuring out how I'm going to do my roads, where they'll go, and where all the different places will be. The squares and circles are just placeholders until I can find actual icons. Squares are cities, towns, and villages. Circles are adventure areas with special points of interest.

I also got rid of the rivers at the top right.

I really wanted to work on this some more today, but it's so cold here right now that my hands and fingers are stiff and frozen. Makes it really hard to work, so I guess I'll just go curl up by the fireplace and watch TV instead.

Isolden WIP-06 by Neyjour.png

[Lingon]

Those roads and towns actually added a lot I think, they tie the map together really nicely. Will be even better if you find some icons

Don't forget the tea in the cold!

[AleksiHietanen]

Looks great, I love the dark atmosphere, colors and textures! You could try brightening the ocean up a bit though and darkening the rivers so they matched up Secondly, you could add some randomness and variation to your tree brush, now the trees look a tad too identical and cloned. Otherwise it's a gorgeous map and I definitely envy your skills!

Aleksi

[- Max -]

Hey Neyjour you might want to check some splitting rivers issues on this map

[eViLe_eAgLe]

Indeed, watch out for the river police.

[Neyjour]

Lingon - Thanks! Yeah, hopefully I can find what I'm looking for with the icons. Tea? No, no...it's all about the coffee!

AleksiHietanen - Thanks very much! Once the actual continent is finished, I'll start playing around with the ocean colour. Also, the rivers are just placeholders right now. Once the terrain is completely finished, those will be completely redrawn and recoloured. I've found some tree brushes that might look better. I'll give them a whirl and try to get some more diversity in size!

The river police found me?! Eeek!! *hangs head in shame* Okay, but seriously...I've never done rivers before (and I'm fairly clueless about that) so if you guys could point out exactly where I've gone wrong with that, I'd really appreciate it. I want to make sure I don't have any glaring mistakes before I start the final redraw.

[Bogie]

Nice map Neyjour, great colors. My advice is that the rivers and Lava are such an intense color compared to the rest of the map. I think they would look better if they were a softer color with a little texture to them. Then they would blend in nicer. ( I'm not an artist so I'm not sure if I put that in the right terminology )

Funny that it is warmer here in Maine than it is for you in Texas. I was a crappy rainy day, but it still hit 52 degrees, a heat wave compared to the 17 degrees it was yesterday.

[Psylence]

Neyjour - http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...ght-place.html

Page 10, in particular, is a good one as it has a .pdf that sums up the information nicely. Short and skinny - Once rivers join up they very rarely split and if they do only for a very short period.

[jtougas]

This is really great and to be honest if you like the rivers and you can make sense of them then leave them. I appreciate the effort people put into creating truly accurate rivers ans if you need (or just want) them to be strictly "earth-like" then go for it.

[Neyjour]

Bogie - Thanks! The rivers and lava are just placeholders right now. Once the terrain is done, I'm going to merge all the layers and actually cut the rivers out, then re-apply the drop shadows (like you see around the continent now). So the background paper texture of the ocean will run right up into the rivers/lakes, and then I might use a transparent layer of blue on top of that, just to brighten the rivers/lakes up a bit. I'll see how it goes when I get to that point. Same thing for the lava too, except I'm planning to use an actual lava texture for that portion. I bought a really nice one on deviantART that I'm hoping will work for it. If not, I might just do some transparent layers of red/orange/yellow on top of the ocean texture for that as well. We had a cold front go through, so it's been pretty miserable for the past few days. Constant drizzling rain and really chilly temperatures. But today was a little bit warmer.

Psylence - Thanks very much! Going to download that now and give it a read-through!

jtougas - Thank you! I'll see how badly I've messed up and decide how much I want/need to change. But yeah, I'm not overly concerned with making them completely accurate, but I would like to avoid any glaring/obvious errors if possible.